The Museu Nacional proposes with this exhibition to revisit the figure of this painter and illustrator, not very well known but with a surprising personality and career, born in Barcelona in 1876. His first steps in the world of art are associated with the scene at Els 4 Gats, the crucial epicentre of Catalan Modernisme. In these circles the artist got to know the most veteran promoters of modernity and shared the yearnings of the emerging generation that was to follow them. This is when he met Picasso – who between 1899 and 1900 did three charcoal portraits of Torent – and also Carles Casagemas, Joaquim Mir and Hermen Anglada Camarasa.

Like other contemporary artists, Torent travelled to Paris at the start of the new century and established himself there. He had begun working as an illustrator in the most popular Catalan magazines of the period (Luz, L’Esquella de la Torratxa or Hispania) and he continued doing this in Paris (L’Asiette au Beurre, La Vie Parisienne or Le Rire).

An adventurer by nature, he moved to New York in 1914 and soon came into contact with Hispanic social circles and philanthropic bodies close to Masonry, an organization with which he would become very closely associated. Back in Barcelona, at the end of 1919 the artist began a new chapter in his personal and professional life in his studio in Plaça Medinaceli, and as a teacher of decorative art and drawing.

In 1922, Torent bought a defence tower in Eivissa, Torre d’en Rovira, in the locality of Sant Josep. There he established his summer residence and he created a museum of archaeological remains and a capricious monumental park that would reveal the most curious and eccentric side of the artist.